Season Fair
ALEO @ The Shepherd
1265 Parkview St.
Detroit
Sept. 11-13, 2026
You would think that photography might feel a little out of place in a fine art show dominated by paintings. But in Season Fair’s Detroit Presents exhibition, Jessica Nabongo’s photographs stood out for other reasons.
The Detroit-born-and-raised artist has been taking photos since 2005, mostly while traveling. In 2019, she completed the rare accomplishment of traveling to every country in the world. Of those countries, there were only 11 where she didn’t spend the night, she told me.
In 2023, Nabongo wanted to find a way to push her photography beyond the traditional framed photograph and make the images feel more like physical art objects. Her solution was to bring pieces of each picture’s location into the work itself.
“For collectors that typically don’t collect photography, this acts as a bridge,” she told a guest at the Season Fair show. It was only the second time the pieces had been shown, following a 2024 exhibition at Christie’s in London.
The result is a series of photographs with frames made from materials connected to the places where the images were taken.
In one piece, a man in Myanmar balances on the edge of a boat with a fishing net. A fishing net was incorporated into the frame. In another, a woman in the Central African Republic chops plantains, with plantain chips becoming part of the piece. A photograph of a man in Uganda playing mancala is surrounded by the marbles used in the game.
The materials aren’t just decorative. They give the photographs a three-dimensional layer to look at, turning moments Nabongo captured while traveling into something you can almost reach out and touch.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen photography that felt this unique and intriguing, especially when it ended up being some of my favorite work in a building full of paintings.
Most of the photographs in the series were taken before the pandemic, when Nabongo was traveling from country to country with several different cameras. Some were shot on a Canon. Others were taken, surprisingly, on a Google Pixel 3.
That technical detail is easy to miss because the photographs have such a polished quality. Some of the images are so clean and smooth that some guests said from a distance, they could almost pass for oil paintings.
But the point isn’t necessarily to make photography look like painting. Nabongo’s work seems more interested in challenging the idea of what a photograph can be.
Season Fair as a whole felt, at times, like a space made for the more elite side of the art world. But I was glad to see the fair give six Detroit artists their own space to show their work, creating a small bridge between that world and the artists making work here.
And, it was cool to learn that Nabongo was from Detroit and hear more about her art and travels.
Her work was a good reminder that a photograph can be more than something you look at. There can be a story in the frame too — in more ways than one.
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